Courtesy Mark BrowningMaster Sergeant Jerry Glesmann tends to an Afghan Army soldier wounded during a battle last October, near the end of his last deployment.

After multiple deployments in two conflicts, it's time for a frank discussion about the role of the National Guard

Master Sgt. Jerry Glesmann of Salem got back from a 10-month tour in Afghanistan in November. Now he's thinking about redeploying to Iraq with his friends in the Tigard-based 41st Brigade Combat Team, who are scheduled to go in June or July.

"I've got a lot of experience," he explained last week. "To let that go to waste ... I could possibly help save a soldier."

He's done it before. In the last six years, he's served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, went to Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, trained peacekeepers in Mongolia and participated in an exercise in Japan. In Afghanistan, his fellow soldiers credit him with saving at least one life and possibly two in the aftermath of an explosion that tore apart a mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle and killed an Oregon Guard officer and two Afghan interpreters.

Glesmann and soldiers like him exemplify the nation's heavy reliance on the National Guard, which has been repeatedly called upon to fight two wars, as well as fulfill its domestic missions, such as fighting fires and assisting in floods and blizzards. Oregon's biggest National Guard deployment since World War II is scheduled for this summer, when some 3,000 soldiers from the 41st Brigade will be tasked with providing security for troops and contractors in Iraq. For many, it will be their second, third or even fourth deployment.

The National Guard is being worked at a pace it hasn't seen for more than 60 years, yet it's happened largely without a public debate on the proper roles of the nation's military reserve component.

The country has "violated its unwritten social compact" with the National Guard and Reserves, retired four-star Gen. Jack Keane told a group of journalists at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism in College Park, Md., recently. "We shouldn't be as dependent as we are on the Guard to carry out wars in this frequency."

It happened, he said, because "we woke up post 9/11 and realized we don't have a strategic reserve anymore."

Keane's ambition is to make the Army larger so it won't be as necessary to lean on the National Guard to fight alongside full-time troops. Such a shift would mark a return to using the Guard for what military officials call a "strategic reserve," rather than an "operational reserve." The National Guard served as a strategic reserve during the Vietnam War, while most combat was carried out by full-time soldiers, many of whom were reluctant draftees. The military vastly prefers the current system of an all-volunteer force, but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the country to accelerate the use of its reserves.

To be sure, the country has adjusted in some ways to the heavy burden it placed on the Guard. Army National Guard soldiers are better equipped and have better educational and medical benefits today than they had before Sept. 11, 2001. But the nation still has not confronted the fundamental question of precisely what role it wants the Guard to serve.

In the course of its history, the United States has changed the way it uses the Guard more than once. The Spanish-American War was fought primarily by state militias, and reservists and National Guard soldiers participated fully in World Wars I and II. Brig. Gen. Mike Caldwell of the Oregon Military Department cites Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which speaks of Congress' duty to "raise and support armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years" and to "provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia." The Founding Fathers clearly envisioned a larger role for state militias than for a standing army, Caldwell argues. Further, it's cheaper for the country to maintain a Guard than a standing army.

So while generals like Keane want a larger standing army and National Guard officers like Caldwell want larger militias, the argument will be settled by whose politics are more effective, rather than by a fuller debate about which component of the military deserves a larger role.

"That discussion needs to take place, but hasn't taken place," said recently retired U.S. Rep. Darlene Hooley, a Democrat who served on the House Veterans Affairs Committee while representing Oregon's 5th District. Members of the full-time military, she said, "don't want to have a debate on it. They are so desperate to have people to hit their quotas."

Hooley says the nation still hasn't made the same sort of tangible commitment to the Guard that it has to the active Army. She is especially troubled by the re-integration process, in which Guard members return home and, after a series of debriefings, scatter to their homes around the state. Full-time soldiers, however, typically return to a military base, which provides an organized support system, including a population of others like themselves. If they later seek emotional support or medical treatment, they are better positioned to get it. Hooley would like for the country to pay for up to three months' paid leave for National Guard soldiers after they get home, to give them more time to reorient themselves to civilian life and remove the pressure to immediately bring home a paycheck.

41st Brigade patch

The uneven treatment of the Guard and the active Army is, in a way, also at the root of the grass-roots efforts in Oregon and elsewhere to convince governors not to deploy their state militias. In Oregon, activists have persuaded Oregon legislators to introduce bills calling on Gov. Ted Kulongoski to refuse to send Oregon Guard soldiers to Iraq or Afghanistan. Their central argument is that the federal authority authorizing troops in Iraq and in the "global war on terror" has become obsolete, partly because it is open-ended. The assertion strikes to the core of the National Guard's dual mission as a domestic militia and as a federalized fighting force.

"These days, I'm wondering, isn't the National Guard like a rainy day fund?" said one supporter, Portland's Dan Mayhew, whose son is scheduled to redeploy with the 41st Brigade this year. "Isn't it the military analogue of an IRA that shouldn't be touched except in the most pressing of emergencies?"

While the bills in the Oregon House and Senate are unlikely to pass, the long-running engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq have spawned widespread dissent over the military policies that put the Guard in the two theaters. The Keep-The-Guard-Home effort has perhaps become a way to launch the conversation the country has never had about the way it should use the National Guard.

At the same time, the policy debate has diverged from the lives of individual soldiers like Jerry Glesmann, who are focused on preparing their families, friends and employers for their extended absences. In the months leading up to their summertime deployments, they are training to carry out their jobs in Iraq, because they know that the safety of their comrades may depend on their efforts. As always with soldiers, they will do their jobs to support their friends and to serve their country.

Their country, in return, should honor their service by, at least, conducting a public discussion about the things it is asking them to do.